Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck (2003) is a collection of short historical essays on dice, by master magician Ricky Jay (RIP) and accompanied by photography by Rosamund Purcell (more on that in a moment). Jay is primarily interested in the six-sided variety and is preoccupied with their use in prestidigitation, games of chances and good, old-fashioned swindling. And while he never touches on their use as randomizers in board games or in roleplaying games, the book still provides these dice-obsessed hobbies with a chatty and entertaining look at their favorite cube’s long, long history.
While I am always down for more of Jay’s prose (that there isn’t more of it is truly the world’s loss), I find the Purcell’s photographs particularly engrossing in this instance. Her subjects are Jay’s collection of dying dice from his own vast collection. As he explains in one essay, the dice are celluloid, which was the first commercially produced synthetic plastic. Celluloid dice can remain stable for years, then rapidly begin to decay in unusual ways, cracking, crumbling, letting off gases and shedding impurities in a variety of catastrophic ways. Purcell’s photos of this process are sublime meditations on the beauty of entropy.
I can’t tell you the delight I experienced about a dozen years ago when I went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology for the first time and saw a number of Jay’s dying dice on display there. They were under glass, in a hallway, and though lit dramatically, they were a bit easy to miss for most folks to wander by without noticing. But not me! They had, at one time, been carefully arranged on little platforms, but in many cases, the turbulence of their decay had caused them to tumble around. An unusually chaotic and untidy museum display. I hope they’re still there, and I wonder what shape they’re in now…
